By Michael F. Duggan
In Washington, D.C., a city crowded with monuments, the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, is my favorite.
We all know of the historian and writer, Henry Adams, but less well-know is his wife, Marian Hooper “Clover” Adams, a pioneering photographer who took her own life in 1885. Henry would commission the sculpture that would mark her grave, now his grave too. The sculptor is Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who called it The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. Although heavy, it is prossibly my favorite American sculpture as well.
It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s special place in the city, and she would go there to sit and think. Twain liked it too and is supposed to have given it the informal title of Grief, the name by which I first knew it (it has also been called Despair). Adams opposed and resisted all of the names bestowed on the sculpture.
Of the androgynous, draped figure in bronze, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—who was friends with the Adamses and who once sat for a photographic portrait by Clover—wrote: “I should not call it despair any more than hope. It is simply the end and silence. The universe escapes epithets. It is enough if you find it beautiful and awful.”
Like Mrs. Roosevelt, I see the figure as female. Unlike Justice Holmes, I see in it a depth of human emotion confronted with loss.